Multiple attachments and the role of the father Flashcards
(5 cards)
Research’s on Multiple attachments and the role of the father
Schaffer
Bowlby (1988)
Field (1978)
Schaffer:
•Schaffer found that the primary attachment figure was the mother 65% of the time. In 30% of cases the mother and someone else (i.e: the father) were both primary attachment figures, but only in 3% of cases was the father the primary attachment figure. This may be due to cultural and temporal reasons (i.e: is it part of living in Glasgow or in the 1960s?) or potentially biological reasons.
•The role of mothers and fathers have changed in Western cultures since the 1960s, with mother more likely to work and father more likely to help with a greater proportion of the childrearing that previously was done by the mother. This is likely to have an impact on attachment patterns in infants.
Bowlby (1988)
Bowlby (1988) reasoned that if patterns of attachment are a product of how their mother has treated them, it could be anticipated that the pattern they develop with their father is the product of how their father has treated them. Bowlby suggests that fathers can fill a role closely resembling that filled by a mother but points out that in most cultures this is uncommon. Bowlby argues that in most families with young children, the father’s role tends to be different. According to Bowlby, a father is more likely to engage in physically active and novel play than the mother and tends to become his child’s preferred play companion.
Field (1978)
Field (1978) conducted research which compared the behaviours of primary caretaker mothers with primary and secondary caretaker fathers. Face-to-face interactions were analysed from video footage with infants at 4 months of age. Overall, it was observed that fathers engaged more in game playing and held their infants less. However, primary caretaker fathers engaged in significantly more smiling, imitative grimaces, and imitative vocalizations than did secondary caretaker fathers and these were comparable with mothers’ behaviour. This suggests that men who take on the role of primary caregiver change their interactional style to be more like that of a mother in terms of comfort and sensitive responsiveness.
Evaluation for research on the Multiple attachments and the role of the father
Research on the importance of the father in social development finds that males can effectively take on a more maternal role could provide confidence to fathers taking on the role of primary caregiver and for single gender families (i.e: those with two dads) becoming more common in modern society.
Infants are unable to communicate their thoughts and emotions, so findings are based on inferences about the internal mental states of the infant based on observations of the infant’s behaviour. This is unscientific as it is subjective and so may suffer from observer bias, an interpretation matching the observer’s preconceptions. This may have occurred in Schaffer and Emerson’s study as they only used one observer during home visits and recordings were not possible at the time, so we can’t review their observations.
